In Conversation with Bessie Head shows how reading the novels and letters of Botswana's most influential writer, Bessie Head, fosters an ongoing conversation between reader and writer and is in fact a very personal undertaking. Each chapter tackles two parallel threads, the first regarding Mary S. Lederer's own history of reading Head-from her first purchase of Maru, through completing a Ph.D. on Head's trilogy, through living in Botswana and connecting with various aspects of Head's life, to examining how reading Head has affected her own development as a human being. This history then ties each chapter into discussion of how Head develops her own vision of the "brotherhood of man." Alongside critically informed discussion, Head's vision is examined through the prism of specific questions. Why is madness not a useful concept for understanding Head's ideas? Why did Head say she was not a feminist, and what is the significance of "male" and "female" in her novels? What is the relationship between individual, race, and community? How can the nature of God be a clear expression of love but also an indistinct force for both good and evil? Head's novels present opportunities for personal growth, and through these "conversations" with her, we become different readers. In Conversation with Bessie Head is an intense, moving-and sometimes maddening-engagement with an elusive author. But it stays remarkably faithful to the Bessie Head with whom I worked and struggled, especially in its evocations of Bessie's deeply felt spirituality. This radical recasting of the Head mystique-at once personal and scholarly-is a boon and a challenge to Bessie's many devoted readers.